Pliny is generally accredited as the first historian of the cherry. Nearly eighteen and a half centuries ago he gave an account of the cherries of Rome with the statement that Lucullus, the Roman soldier and gourmet, had brought them to Rome 65 years before Christ[12] from the region of the Black Sea. This particular in the account proves to be a good illustration of the adage that old errors strike root deeply. Though disproved beyond all question of doubt time and time again by botanists and historians, Pliny's inadvertence is still everywhere current in text-books, pomologies and cyclopaedias—a mis-statement started, repeated and perpetuated from medieval days when to be printed in Pliny was sufficient proof. That Lucullus brought to Italy a cherry and one which the Romans did not know there is no reason to doubt, but other cherries there must have been, not only wild but cultivated, of Prunus cerasus at least and probably of Prunus avium, and in comparative abundance long before Lucullus, returning from the war in Pontus with Mithridates, brought to Rome a cherry. With this brief mention of Pliny's inaccuracy, we pass to more substantial facts in the history of the cherry.
The domestication of one or the other of the two generally cultivated species of cherries followed step by step the changes from savagery to civilization in the countries of Europe and of western Asia. For, as one sorts the accumulated stores of botanical and historical evidence, it becomes quickly apparent that both the Sweet and the Sour Cherry now grow wild and long have done so in the region named and that, from the time tillage of plants was first practiced in the Old World, this fruit has been under cultivation, feeble, obscure, and interrupted by war and chase though its cultivation may have been. Certainly the history of the cherry is as old as that of agriculture in the southern European countries and is interwritten with it.
In beginning the history of a cultivated plant the first step is to ascertain where it grows spontaneously—where it may be found unplanted and unattended by man. This is the task now before us for Prunus cerasus and Prunus avium, discussing them in the order named.
THE ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED CHERRIES
Prunus cerasus, of which the Montmorency is the commonest representative in America, is now to be found wild wherever Sour Cherries are much grown, for it is a favorite food of many birds which quickly scatter its seeds from centers of cultivation. Nearly all of the botanies of temperate regions in which agriculture is carried on name this cherry as an escape from cultivation into woods and hedgerows and along roadsides. The Sour Cherry, then, is now to be found truly wild in many parts of several continents. It is not so easy to say where the habitat and what the condition before the species was cultivated. But botany, archaeology, history and philology indicate that the original habitat of the Sour Cherry is southeastern Europe and the nearby countries in Asia.
After saying that this cherry has been found wild in the forests of Asia Minor, the plains of Macedonia, on Mount Olympus and in neighboring territories, De Candolle, however, limits its habitat to the region "from the Caspian Sea to the environments of Constantinople."[13] But as a wild plant this cherry must have spread over a far greater area. Even the broadest boundaries of the habitat of Prunus cerasus as set by De Candolle show over-caution. Thus, the Marasca cherry, a botanical variety of Prunus cerasus, is most certainly wild in the Province of Dalmatia on the Adriatic Sea in Austria; so, too, it is certain that this species is feral as far away from De Candolle's center of distribution as northern Austria and southern Germany and has been so for untold ages. It is safe to say that the original source of the Sour Cherry was the territory lying between Switzerland and the Adriatic Sea on the west and the Caspian Sea and probably somewhat farther north on the east. That is, our savage forefathers must have found this cherry in the region thus outlined, probably in a much more extended territory, into which it was brought in more or less remote times by agencies other than human from De Candolle's smaller area of origin.
It is easier to define the geographic range of the wild Sweet Cherry. Botanists very generally agree that Prunus avium as a wild plant inhabits all of the mainland of Europe in which the cultivated varieties of the species can be grown—that is, most of the continent south of Sweden, and may be found wild well into southern Russia. The species is reported sparingly wild in northern Africa and is a very common wild plant in southern Asia as far east as northern India. It must not be thought that the plant is everywhere abundant in the great area outlined as its habitat. To the contrary, the Sweet Cherry is an uncommon wild plant in Spain, Italy and other parts of southern Europe. All authorities agree that the region of greatest communal intensity for Prunus avium is between the Caspian and Black Seas and south of these bodies of water. It might suffice to say that from about these seas the Sweet Cherry came—that here grew the trunk from which branches were spread into other lands by birds and animals carrying the seeds from place to place. The most important fact to be established, however, is that this cherry has long grown spontaneously over a widely extended territory and may, therefore, have been domesticated in several widely separated regions.
THE CHERRY IN GREECE; THE FIRST RECORD OF CULTURE AND THE NAME
Having established the habitats of the two cultivated cherries we may next ask when and where their cultivation began. The domestication of plants probably began in China—certainly Chinese agriculture long antedates that of any other nation now in existence of which we have records. Agriculture in China, historians roughly approximate, goes back 4,000 years. But while the Chinese have many other species of cherry, as we have seen, some of which may be said to be partially domesticated, Prunus cerasus and Prunus avium are not found wild in China and were only in recent years introduced there as cultivated plants. Neither does the cherry of our civilization seem to have been known in the second great agricultural region of the world—Egypt and the extreme southwest of Asia. At least there are no words for the cherry in the languages of the peoples of that region and cherry pits have not been found with the remains of other plants in the tombs and ruins of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. Nor does the cherry seem to have been cultivated in India until comparatively recent times.
These very brief and general statements show that cherries were not cultivated in the first agricultural civilizations and serve to fix the time and the place of the domestication of the cherry a little more definitely. Records of cherries as cultivated plants begin, so far as the researches of botanical historians now show, with Greek civilization though it is probable, for several reasons, that some cultivated cherries came to Greece from Asia Minor.